Influências culturais na realização do exame preventivo do câncer de colo : Revisão integrativa

Abstract

Cervical cancer has grown a lot in recent years, contributing to increasing the mortality rate, especially in the least developed countries. It also has the characteristic of being a silent disease, which begins to present symptoms very late. Based on this, the objective was to analyze if the social-cultural factors influence the accomplishment of cervical cancer screening, according to scientific evidence available in the literature. An Integrative Review of literature with primary study searches was conducted in the Virtual Health Library (VHL) and in the following databases: US National Library ofMedicine - National Institutes of Health (PubMed), Scopus and Web of Scienceapplying the descriptors according to the particularity of each database. The research was carried out with eight primary studies, demonstrating several barriers that impede the search for health care such as religious beliefs, in which the disease was identified as God's will; fear of diagnosis, as well as fear to feel pain when performing the examination; the embarrassment and/or discomfort in showing the intimate part and also the fear related to virginity. Cancer death rates are higher in racial and ethnic minorities than in white people, there is a predominance of non-white patients (76.8%) diagnosed with the disease. It was evident that cultural factors negatively influence the search for health care, having as main barriers the cultural factors related to constraints, concerns and/or discomfort with the male health professional as well as the lack of information and/or knowledge about the screening importance.